“I was on a date at the beach — he wanted to swim, and I didn’t. As I was sitting on the towel, a seagull took a huge shit on my head. I ran into the water, and my date thought I had a change of heart and wanted to swim with him. He playfully came over to me in the water, and I said: ‘Get the f**k away from me, please.’ He is now my ex-husband, and I realize I should have considered myself forewarned.”

“I went on vacation at a beach in Hawaii with my grandma, aunt, cousin, and cousin’s boyfriend. I was 15 years old, and my cousin was about 17 years old. I tried to tread in the water when I got caught in an undercurrent. When I resurfaced, my bikini top came up around my neck, and my cousin’s boyfriend looked right at me. I’m going to guess that my cousin’s boyfriend saw my breasts before he saw hers.”

3. Submitted by Lenore Scheepers (Facebook)

“I was 16 years old when I went to the beach with a high school friend. After we splashed around in the water, we went back to our towels to tan. Lying on our bellies and yakking like teens do, we noticed some movement out the corner of our eyes. We looked up and found a middle-aged man about three yards away from us, jerking off. Yay.”

4. Submitted by Emily Merritt (Facebook)

“One time, my friend and I were laying out on the beach. It was a really windy day, so everyone’s stuff was flying all over the place. A giant gust of wind actually picked up this family’s umbrella and it flew down the beach; and because I have the worst luck ever, it impaled the back of my leg. So yes, I was stabbed by a beach umbrella. Everyone ran over to me and there was so much blood everywhere. The family didn’t even offer me a free beer.”

5. Submitted by Brian Lisk (Facebook)

“I went to Block Island with my family and friends when I was around 13 years old. I was boogie boarding and having fun, until I slid off my board and was dragged across the sandy beach by the wave. Here’s where it gets bad: The dragging caused my nipples to chafe against my swim shirt. For anyone who’s had any part of their body chafed, adding a shirt soaked in salt water to the equation is like pouring fire ants on your body. It hurt so bad, my friend had to put Band-Aids on my nipples. Unfortunately, she could only find the SpongeBob SquarePants variety. I sat on the beach with SpongeBob Band-Aids on my nips.”

6. Submitted by Colton Winters (Facebook)

“When I was little I got wrapped in jellyfish tentacles! The tentacles went down my pants and they stung my butt. I screamed so loud that my parents thought I got attacked by a shark! Needless to say, my whole family laughed at me.”

7. Submitted by Kate Asselin (Facebook)

“I went on vacation with my cousins and our grandparents in South Carolina. We went swimming at Myrtle Beach, and I woke up the next day covered in hives. So after 24 hours my grandparents took me to a walk-in clinic where I got a steroid shot on my butt. The doctors warned us that the hives might get worse before they got better, and boy were they right. Hives on my eyelids, on the bottoms of my feet, and everywhere in between. I spent the better part of two days afterward laying in my grandparents’ bed, throwing up, too embarrassed to leave the house.”

8. Submitted by Evelyn Pinkham (Facebook)

“I went on vacation in Maine with family when I was about 8 years old. I built a sandcastle down by the water, which didn’t turn out too well because waves washed over it. One wave left me a present, though: a used condom. I ran away and never spoke about it again.”

“A few years ago, at Jones Beach on Long Island, my sister held onto my daughter while she swam in the waves. My daughter panicked because she got water in her nose, jumped up, and knocked my sister’s tooth out. She bled all over the place, and had to go to an emergency dentist to get it fixed. Good times.”

10. Submitted by Kayla Marie Dixon (Facebook)

“I visited my boyfriend on Kauai, which is a very secluded beach. All of a sudden I really had to go to the bathroom, but the nearest one was at least 20 minutes away. I was frantically panicking, so I did the only thing I could do: I dug a hole and took care of business. I covered up the disgusting mess, but my boyfriend still won’t let me live it down.”

“In high school I went to the beach with my friends (prior to that day, I hadn’t gone to the beach for about two years). So, I decided it would be a good idea to sit in the sun for 10 hours. I unfortunately forgot my sunscreen, so my friend offered some of hers that she found in the trunk of her car. Not thinking twice, I sprayed it on and went to take a nap. After a few applications of the sunscreen and about 10 hours later, I finally looked at the sunscreen and noticed it had expired four years earlier! Did you know that expired spray-on sunscreen acts like PAM Cooking Spray? After I got home and looked at myself in the mirror, I realized I made a huge mistake. I didn’t move for three days.”

12. Submitted by Adriana Gómez (Facebook)

“When I was around 8 years old, I used to love to walk down the beach and pick up pebbles. This one time I went on a walk with my cousin, and I picked up something that looked like a large pebble. My cousin started to laugh and told me to drop it. I took a closer look at the “pebble,” and it was poop. I picked up poop, with my bare hand. My family renamed that beach ‘poop beach,’ and we never returned to it. They still make fun of me for it, and I’m 30 years old.”

“I was in Newport, Rhode Island, one summer, and I decided to go surfing at the beach during red tide season. Because I’m from California, I figured that I could handle “just a little kelp” because in Malibu there is a ton of kelp, and it never really interfered with my surfing. When I got to the beach in Newport, I suited up in my wetsuit and started to paddle on my board toward an area away from the red and smelly kelp. About 10 minutes in, I started catching a wave and I noticed a stinging sensation on my foot. When I brought my foot up on to the board, there wasn’t a single scratch, so I continued surfing. Then all of a sudden, I started to feel stinging sensations everywhere. I raced out of the ocean with my board and ripped my wetsuit off to find 20-plus sea lice biting me underneath! I picked every disgusting bug off myself and then went to go sit in my car. Even then I still had sea lice in my hair, biting my scalp. I didn’t go back in the ocean for the rest of the week, and I’ll never go in the ocean again during red tide season.”

“An ex-boyfriend of mine told me his beach story: When he was younger, he got sand in his bladder. This is common for girls and women but EXTREMELY rare for men, because the sand has to travel up their you-know-what. It was so rare that he was documented in a medical journal.”